Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Who knew we were electing Roberto D'Aubuisson four years ago. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine? Burn in hell, killer.

In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and
former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the
role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally
overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative
deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay
in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was
adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the
Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and
dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to
counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious
campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American
cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy
one.”

His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a
“Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new
category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting;
and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths
that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers.

The administration’s failure to forge a clear detention policy has
created the impression among some members of Congress of a
take-no-prisoners policy. And Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan,
Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.’s strikes drive American policy there, saying “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” a colleague said.

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John
O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police
detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White
House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to
Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war”
theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

But the strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda — just since April, there
have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan — have also tested both men’s
commitment to the principles they have repeatedly said are necessary to
defeat the enemy in the long term. Drones have replaced Guantánamo as
the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea,
Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square,
justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones
hit, they don’t see children.”

Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010,
said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy
against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The
steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ —
reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr. Blair, a retired
admiral who began his Navy service during that war.

William M. Daley, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, said the president
and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names
to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains
unanswered is how much killing will be enough.